Japanese mobile phone company eAccess Ltd. discontinued running a commercial that showed a small monkey in a suit addressing a crowd at a political rally:

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23931545-5006003,00.html?fro m=public_rss

According to the story linked above, this monkey is the company mascot, and in Asian cultures, using a monkey to represent a person does not have racist connotations.

A few weeks ago, we had a topic about "TheSock Obama," a stuffed animal of a monkey in a suit that many interpreted as a racial slam against Obama. The question of why depicting a Black person as a monkey is more offensive that doing the same to someone of a different race brought one possible explanation to mind: some very early models of human evolution showed the different races of humans in different parts of the evolutionary tree. They had "Negroes" as the first branch with the other races branching off from this one. Although that is not the currently accepted human evolutionary model, I think that somehow, the ideas that this outdated model implies are evoked in American audiences by monkey caricatures, such as "TheSock Obama."

Curious George '08

Yeah. We heard that one before, MC74. It's not any funnier now.